Genuine naval jelly should be doing that bit... the thing it, and other rust convertors don't do, is prevent any unrusted at time of application metal from going rusty. The sealing off of oxygen and humidity from the surface with an oil or wax would though.

Could oils contain acid?

G-X wrote on 2024-08-01, 18:24:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-08-01, 16:57:

That can happen from being in oily or greasy environments for many years. Kitchens and car garages can be really bad. I remember working on PCs for automotive shops in the early-mid 2000s and they were the greasiest, second most disgusting machines ever. Almost as bad as one that has been in a chain smoker's home for a few years. We often don't think of how much stuff is floating in the air until we see it accumulated in things that constantly draw in air, like computers. Everything from the rubber microparticles that come from tire-wear near roads or the vaporized oil and fuel in exhaust to that lovely smell of cooking oil floating in the air in a kitchen. It all collects in our devices with active cooling. Of course, it also collects in us, and that's probably a bigger concern. 😮

Can confirm (work in automotive) the screen on my work laptop always get's a film of sticky goo after a week or so. If dust lands on it and you try to clean it suddenly it starts making streaks all over. Meaning there is oily mess floating arround all the time. I can clean my workbench and i kid you not 4 hours later if you wipe your hand over the top it's all dust/dirt. Image a pc that's running 24/7 for years in this enviroment (or my lungs).

I used to do IT work for a heavy duty automotive company. Sometimes someone would leave a cup of coffee in the truck shop and it was horrifying to see what would accumulate in it overnight. I found it interesting that we never opened up and cleaned the computers that we used to connect to engines. When we did have to service them, the motherboards would often be coated in half an inch of grime. Surprisingly, none of the problems seemed to be related to heat issues. Rather, it would usually be for a failed hard drive (I don't remember drive temperatures being a problem). Of course these computers weren't used for gaming (I did notice that were being used for other activities better left unsaid...), so they weren't really being pushed to their limits.

I always think of that when I see guys clean their gaming PCs with canned air on a weekly basis. They would be horrified to see the computers that sat in a garage for years without cleaning.

Wow... it's not every day that you rediscover a game that you enjoyed as a child and haven't seen or thought of in 30 years. I've been watching the 1957 Zorro TV show with my family recently (used to watch the reruns as a kid; still a fantastic show) and for some reason tonight I thought... "I wonder if they made any decent Zorro games back in the day?"

... then I found this: https://www.mobygames.com/game/30778/zorro/

Oh. My. Goodness. I used to play this on my Aunt and Uncle's Atari 8-bit computer (either a 65XE or 130XE) back in the very early 90s. Over the years I have thought of, and even played, some of the other weird games I played on that system. Like Ninja or Tree Surgeon (a game so obscure it still isn't on MobyGames??) ... but in all these years I haven't seen or thought of this Zorro game. As a person that deeply enjoys digging up as much information as possible about random bits of data, images, sounds, etc. from my past, this is just a super rare occurrence these days.

Yet, as soon as I saw the screenshots of it I immediately remembered the funky shapes of the scenery in the cave at the beginning, the character sprites, and after watching a video of it, some of the gameplay elements, music and sound effects immediately came back to me. Honestly, it looks like a total slog of a game, like most were back in the mid 80s, but MAN does that take me back in time. I guess I need to dig through the Atari 8-bit catalog a bit more thoroughly... I wonder what else I've missed.

I repowered my Tecmar expansion chassis over the past few days and hooked it up to my Zenith Z-157. I had to wait a year for a pc-side Tecmar bridge card to appear on ebay first, and the old power supply was dead.

The old PSU was bespoke, uncovered, and worked along a 110v cooling fan that was chassis mounted. I retained it's wiring harness since the backplane used a 5-pin and 3-pin molex set, not to standard pinouts. I attached these wires to the ATX PS breakout board, retasked the AT power switch to start the AtX PS and turn on power to the 110v receptacles in the chassis, and replaced the chassis cooling fan. The PSU was placed there to facilitate airflow to the PSU's fan. Finally, I removed the wall plug from a standard power cable and soldered the cable's wires to the power cord receptacle in the chassis, the other end of the cord plugs into the PSU.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-08-02, 03:35:

I wonder if they made any decent Zorro games back in the day?

There is a 1995 Prince of Persia clone called Zorro. As far as such games go it’s pretty cool.

Turbo -> wrote on 2024-08-01, 21:19:

Could oils contain acid?

I suspect that most oils contain acid. But there is acid free vaseline on the market and stuff to clean rifles with are typically also acid free:
https://www.ballistol-shop.de/guncer-gun-grea … c-additive.html

I finally tested the athlon 64 4000+ and GF 6800 + SB X-fi to see if i could finally eliminate stutters and slowdowns from vampire bloodlines.
At this point it was mostly me challenging myself to build a period correct system that could run the damn game and...
It did! i have never seen the game running this smooth with everything maxed out at 1280x1024 with env audio, it runs over 50fps in all scenarios but the damn beach area which drops to 30fps, it's still quite an achievement, it made rebuild a case from scratch almost.

iraito wrote on 2024-08-02, 12:36:

I finally tested the athlon 64 4000+ and GF 6800 + SB X-fi to see if i could finally eliminate stutters and slowdowns from vampire bloodlines.
At this point it was mostly me challenging myself to build a period correct system that could run the damn game and...
It did! i have never seen the game running this smooth with everything maxed out at 1280x1024 with env audio, it runs over 50fps in all scenarios but the damn beach area which drops to 30fps, it's still quite an achievement, it made rebuild a case from scratch almost.

Nice work!

Glad you were able to get it running well enough on period correct hardware. Would have cost a small fortune to get all that back in 2004, but someone probably had it. 😀

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-08-02, 12:40:

iraito wrote on 2024-08-02, 12:36:

I finally tested the athlon 64 4000+ and GF 6800 + SB X-fi to see if i could finally eliminate stutters and slowdowns from vampire bloodlines.
At this point it was mostly me challenging myself to build a period correct system that could run the damn game and...
It did! i have never seen the game running this smooth with everything maxed out at 1280x1024 with env audio, it runs over 50fps in all scenarios but the damn beach area which drops to 30fps, it's still quite an achievement, it made rebuild a case from scratch almost.

Nice work!

Glad you were able to get it running well enough on period correct hardware. Would have cost a small fortune to get all that back in 2004, but someone probably had it. 😀

It's what i thought, it's an enthusiast level build (it's also a SLI mobo and i'm gonna add a second 6800) which made me ask "What the hell were they using during development?" i know full well that they didn't optimize the game because there was a lot of business drama behind the development, maybe they had monster builds for testing? i can't say but i think they tried the game for very little on a high end PC and called it a day.

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2024-08-01, 21:54:

I used to do IT work for a heavy duty automotive company. Sometimes someone would leave a cup of coffee in the truck shop and it was horrifying to see what would accumulate in it overnight. I found it interesting that we never opened up and cleaned the computers that we used to connect to engines. When we did have to service them, the motherboards would often be coated in half an inch of grime. Surprisingly, none of the problems seemed to be related to heat issues. Rather, it would usually be for a failed hard drive (I don't remember drive temperatures being a problem). Of course these computers weren't used for gaming (I did notice that were being used for other activities better left unsaid...), so they weren't really being pushed to their limits.

I always think of that when I see guys clean their gaming PCs with canned air on a weekly basis. They would be horrified to see the computers that sat in a garage for years without cleaning.

Indeed! Surprisingly few issue's with hardware where i work. We even had Pentium 4 / XP machines running without issue untill this year they forced the shop to go for win11 (quite the jump in OS 😁 ) like with engines these machines that run 24/7 are far less failure prone than ones that do cycles of on/off.

Did some "personal retro computing archeology" and learned a few facts of my own computing history:

1. Triplex, the company that made my first color graphics card (ET4000/W32), had remarked a number of slower VRAM chips and pretended them to be faster ones in late 2004 / early 2005. I was busy with my graduate studies in US so I heard nothing about the news until now. Triplex even mobilized its employees posed as regular users to counter angry netizens on computer-related fora (i.e. astroturfing) after the forgery was discovered. The scandal devastated its reputation and the company never fully recovered.

2. The GF3 Ti200 I bought in 2002 was PixelView Geforece3 Ti200 made by Prolink. The company was long gone; its website went offline in October 2012, six months after it suddenly began some LED lighting business. However I was surprised to see its US division website is still online: PHP pages malfunction but most simpler HTML pages work fine, including its product and driver database. The last Detonator driver of the site was 40.72, indicating its maintenance probably stopped at the end of 2002.

3. Just realized the Asus Terminator T2-P Deluxe barebone my parents bought (much to my chagrin, but I was abroad) in 2004 was based on Intel 865G chipset and Northwood-128 Celeron 2.4 GHz. It really struggled even under WinXP (only had 256 MB RAM, and Celeron's PassMark was roughly on par with Atom N270 or P3-1G) so I retired it around late 2011 or early 2012. If I knew better I would find a standard ATX case and power to replace its cramped case and super-noisy PSU, then install an AGP graphics card, a PCI sound card, and Win98SE, making it a nice Win9x retro build. I still have its HDD, DVD, and FDD, though.
But a P3-1G could have done the same with half the TDP, although with only AGP 4x.

UPDATE: That "Geforece3" was not my typo but Prolink's. 🤣

dormcat wrote on 2024-08-02, 20:09:

Did some "personal retro computing archeology" and learned a few facts of my own computing history:

1. Triplex, the company that made my first color graphics card (ET4000/W32), had remarked a number of slower VRAM chips and pretended them to be faster ones in late 2004 / early 2005. I was busy with my graduate studies in US so I heard nothing about the news until now. Triplex even mobilized its employees posed as regular users to counter angry netizens on computer-related fora (i.e. astroturfing) after the forgery was discovered. The scandal devastated its reputation and the company never fully recovered.

2. The GF3 Ti200 I bought in 2002 was PixelView Geforece3 Ti200 made by Prolink. The company was long gone; its website went offline in October 2012, six months after it suddenly began some LED lighting business. However I was surprised to see its US division website is still online: PHP pages malfunction but most simpler HTML pages work fine, including its product and driver database. The last Detonator driver of the site was 40.72, indicating its maintenance probably stopped at the end of 2002.

Wow, I had never heard that about Triplex. It's amazing what these companies try to pull. Reminds me of the modern day stuff that YT channels like Gamers Nexus report on.

Also, I can't believe that Prolink site is still online! The product page lists FX 5900 cards, so that would put the last update somewhere in mid 2003 at the earliest. Someone has been footing the bill to host that site for 21 years with probably no business whatsoever gained from it. 🤣

Even the whois info seems to still point to Prolink: https://www.whois.com/whois/prolink-usa.com

The US street address seems to be a totally unrelated business now, but someone should email peter@prolink-usa.com to see if it's still deliverable. 😮

EDIT: Whelp, I was bored and I figured I'd do some digging myself.
I looked up Prolink's FCC ID to get more information about them and found this page:
https://fcc.report/FCC-ID/IB9PVPX4072PLUS/
Which lead to this address from 1996: 10F, No. 108-3, Min Chuang Road , Hsin Tien City, Taipei,N/A Taiwan

I can't find that address, and I am completely unfamiliar with translating these languages, but I believe it is just a different translation of this address:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/No.+108-3,+ … qcy_c?entry=ttu

I can't read the other names in the building, but I see that Biostar is listed as being there currently! I can't find any connection between the two companies however.

I'd love to know what the deal is with Prolink. Are there any other sites like this for PC hardware companies that are just inexplicably kept online for 20 years by some unknown party?

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-08-02, 20:21:

EDIT: Whelp, I was bored and I figured I'd do some digging myself. I looked up Prolink's FCC ID to get more information about th […]
Show full quote

EDIT: Whelp, I was bored and I figured I'd do some digging myself.
I looked up Prolink's FCC ID to get more information about them and found this page:
https://fcc.report/FCC-ID/IB9PVPX4072PLUS/
Which lead to this address from 1996: 10F, No. 108-3, Min Chuang Road , Hsin Tien City, Taipei,N/A Taiwan

I can't find that address, and I am completely unfamiliar with translating these languages, but I believe it is just a different translation of this address:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/No.+108-3,+ … qcy_c?entry=ttu

The old address in traditional Chinese: 臺北縣新店市民權路108-3號10樓
The new address in traditional Chinese: 新北市新店區民權路108-3號10樓
The official translation of the new address: 10F., No. 108-3, Minquan Rd., Xindian Dist., New Taipei City

The differences were due to two factors: change of romanization in 2008 (from Wade-Giles to Hanyu Pinyin), and administrative promotion / rearrangement from Taipei County to New Taipei City in 2010.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-08-02, 20:21:

I can't read the other names in the building, but I see that Biostar is listed as being there currently! I can't find any connection between the two companies however.

I'd love to know what the deal is with Prolink. Are there any other sites like this for PC hardware companies that are just inexplicably kept online for 20 years by some unknown party?

Yes, Biostar is on 2F., No. 108-2; basically the same office building but with separate entrances (the building is quite large). However, Prolink had already moved to a new address on April 20, 1998: 臺北市內湖區陽光街349號6樓 (6F., No. 349, Yangguang St., Neihu Dist., Taipei City), right above this 7-Eleven. Spelling differences is visible in their announcement:

And guess who is right across the street on No. 256? Delta! 🤣

Taiwan is a small island; it's natural to see high-tech companies gathered in a small area. 😉

dormcat wrote on 2024-08-03, 02:23:

change of romanization in 2008 (from Wade-Giles to Hanyu Pinyin),

Well done, that's exactly what I would have said if I remembered what it was called and when it was. Never know whether to blurt out my half remembered "bread crumb clues" in cases it jogs someone else's memory or not. Though I would have said something like "There was a change in phoneticisation sometime in the last 20 years" and left everyone to figure that out 🤣

dormcat wrote on 2024-08-03, 02:23:

The old address in traditional Chinese: 臺北縣新店市民權路108-3號10樓 The new address in traditional Chinese: 新北市新店區民權路108-3號10樓 The offici […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-08-02, 20:21:

EDIT: Whelp, I was bored and I figured I'd do some digging myself. I looked up Prolink's FCC ID to get more information about th […]
Show full quote

EDIT: Whelp, I was bored and I figured I'd do some digging myself.
I looked up Prolink's FCC ID to get more information about them and found this page:
https://fcc.report/FCC-ID/IB9PVPX4072PLUS/
Which lead to this address from 1996: 10F, No. 108-3, Min Chuang Road , Hsin Tien City, Taipei,N/A Taiwan

I can't find that address, and I am completely unfamiliar with translating these languages, but I believe it is just a different translation of this address:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/No.+108-3,+ … qcy_c?entry=ttu

The old address in traditional Chinese: 臺北縣新店市民權路108-3號10樓
The new address in traditional Chinese: 新北市新店區民權路108-3號10樓
The official translation of the new address: 10F., No. 108-3, Minquan Rd., Xindian Dist., New Taipei City

The differences were due to two factors: change of romanization in 2008 (from Wade-Giles to Hanyu Pinyin), and administrative promotion / rearrangement from Taipei County to New Taipei City in 2010.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-08-02, 20:21:

I can't read the other names in the building, but I see that Biostar is listed as being there currently! I can't find any connection between the two companies however.

I'd love to know what the deal is with Prolink. Are there any other sites like this for PC hardware companies that are just inexplicably kept online for 20 years by some unknown party?

Yes, Biostar is on 2F., No. 108-2; basically the same office building but with separate entrances (the building is quite large). However, Prolink had already moved to a new address on April 20, 1998: 臺北市內湖區陽光街349號6樓 (6F., No. 349, Yangguang St., Neihu Dist., Taipei City), right above this 7-Eleven. Spelling differences is visible in their announcement:

The attachment R740.jpg is no longer available

And guess who is right across the street on No. 256? Delta! 🤣

Taiwan is a small island; it's natural to see high-tech companies gathered in a small area. 😉

Awesome, thanks for filling in all the blanks and clarifying all of that. 😁

I can't imagine what it's like to live in a place that is just so dense with tech companies.

I have always wanted to ask someone this but... does proximity to these companies actually make computer hardware more readily available? Like, do you find a lot of locally made computer parts for sale, or for better prices than someone in another country? I know here in the US that isn't always the case. For example, living in a town that is based around a massive oil refinery that actually produces gasoline doesn't necessarily have any impact whatsoever on local fuel prices. I'm sure that in both cases (fuel and computers) the issue is that the final steps of actually building and distributing the products happen elsewhere, so they aren't ready for sale until they go to some other place first. All of TSMC's chips coming off the production line can't be used until they're put on a PCB for example.

Do you find an abundance of old hardware, or does it seem more scarce than in other places? I can kind of imagine that an island nation with relatively limited space and the ability to locally produce cutting edge technology would be less inclined to hang on to outdated hardware... but then I don't know the culture well at all.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-08-03, 03:06:

I have always wanted to ask someone this but... does proximity to these companies actually make computer hardware more readily available? Like, do you find a lot of locally made computer parts for sale, or for better prices than someone in another country? I know here in the US that isn't always the case. For example, living in a town that is based around a massive oil refinery that actually produces gasoline doesn't necessarily have any impact whatsoever on local fuel prices. I'm sure that in both cases (fuel and computers) the issue is that the final steps of actually building and distributing the products happen elsewhere, so they aren't ready for sale until they go to some other place first. All of TSMC's chips coming off the production line can't be used until they're put on a PCB for example.

The answer is both yes and no. TSMC's foundry relies on ASML's DUV/EUV lithography machines, yet few -- if any -- end users in the Netherlands would enjoy the benefits of ASML. 😉 Taiwan started building OEM electronics for customers around the world as early as 1970s but many components were export-only, either not available or too expensive for locals. Commodore was probably the best example: with many components made in Taiwan, the brand never opened its business to potential customers on the island, so we couldn't relate ourselves with North American retro communities where Commodore was highly successful decades ago. Some less mainstream computers, such as SFF mini-desktops like Minisforum, Beelink, or Raspberry Pi, are difficult to purchase, with fewer options to choose from, and/or more expensive, even when international online commerce has become so easy and prevalent nowadays.

On the other hand, media keep reporting TSMC's factories in Arizona and Kumamoto, how tech companies and their well-paid engineers raised the real estate prices in Hsinchu, etc., etc. We get bombarded by tech news 24/7. A male college student with STEM major is expected to be capable of at least assemble a desktop PC, install OS, and perform basic troubleshooting by his own. Computer retailing business is highly competitive so few companies dare to cheat on customers; many of them offer extra services like free assembly, fast delivery, late or weekend hours, etc. Large trade shows like Computex Taipei are always covered by major media.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-08-03, 03:06:

Do you find an abundance of old hardware, or does it seem more scarce than in other places? I can kind of imagine that an island nation with relatively limited space and the ability to locally produce cutting edge technology would be less inclined to hang on to outdated hardware... but then I don't know the culture well at all.

I've always been complaining the high humidity climate; if Computer Reset is in Taiwan instead of Texas then everything would rust and crumble in two years instead of being a time capsule for two decades. Furthermore, the majority of people here are more inclined to show off their new belongings instead of vintage ones i.e. "Look at those benchmark numbers of my 14th Gen i9 and RTX 4090!" instead of "Look at my fully operational Apple ][ and IBM 5150!" It's more of a cultural thing. 😅

For tech that happened in Ontario and the neighboring edge of Quebec, the only thing that seems to have a higher concentration here than anywhere else are maybe first few generations of ATI Radeon graphics cards. 6x86 were made here a couple of years, there's Guillemot, gravis, and one of the upgrade CPU ppl whose name I'm blanking on, Gainbery?? anyway, don't seem to see much higher availability of any of those. Though I have Seanix stuff and Patriot computer systems unit which while sales were international, I never hear of them elsewhere, so larger domestic presence maybe.

Playing with my new toy - 86Duino ONE

I've been working on my Toshiba Libretto collection. The plan is to sell off some of my Libretto collection so I only keep *four* of them (interesting 50CT, broken 50CT, perfect 70CT and perfect 100CT). The Libretto 70CT I bought as a parts board is now working and the NiMH battery damage that stopped the RTC circuit from working at all is now fixed with a couple of trace repairs. Thankfully the two vias that were broken still showed light through and a 0.1mm wire could get through to fix them:

That's by the small resistor and then the trace going underneath the larger "1200" resistor. The most obviously broken part was the test pad on the underside of the board.

The real time clock is now working when I connect a battery to it but I wanted something that's going to last a long time without the risks of a NiMH battery while still fitting in the limited space in this computer. So I got this molex 3-pin microblade connector and put two 1n4148 diodes going [Battery] -> [diode 1 >] -> [diode 2 >] -> [laptop RTC positive] so that it can't charge it and it reduces the voltage to around 2.8v. There's a microblade 2-pin connector on there for connecting up a regular shrink-wrapped CR2032 to fit the vertical height limitation.

Gonna do this on some more librettos because it means the RTC battery can be replaced without disassembling the laptop further, which otherwise risks breaking the fairly chalky / fragile plastic tabs on the top case these days.

Overall, pretty great since this Libretto 70CT was the worse of the 2, originally I thought there was also a keyboard fault but that ended up being a fault with the keyboard membrane itself. And I just so happened to have a spare good keyboard with bad keycaps, so now there's one bad keyboard with no keycaps and one good keyboard with good keycaps 😀

The Libretto series are so heavily integrated that they fail in interesting ways compared to the Satellite series where the bigger batteries can do more damage. So far I've found that the 70CT's RTC battery functionality can be broken by battery corrosion, but the Libretto 50CT breaks in a far more troublesome way - just like the Satellite 460CDTs that failed because of trace corrosion, the Libretto 50CT's keyboard traces have test pads and those break first. But that's a pretty easy fix, just hook the keyboard connector pins up to the resistor arrays nearby.

Lastly, this Libretto 70CT was so dim. The libretto series I've always thought the display is rather dim but those are usually pretty evenly dim and usable once the CCFL has warmed up. This 2nd 70CT was so dim and unevenly lit that the screen was barely usable outside of a dimly lit room.
For reference, I have somewhere around four bad Sharp LQ61D133 screens that go in the Libretto 50CT / 70CT and wanted to try some things with them. So I went deep into a broken screen, took its backlight assembly apart from the LCD section and fitted an LED backlight in place of the original. Then took apart the good screen and put the broken screen's backlight onto that:

Honestly I wasn't that impressed overall, the colours looked okay in person but there were some reflections from the LEDs and the camera sees the LED backlight's blue as purple somehow.
Initially I was thinking of trying to retrofit the Libretto's LCD with an LED backlight but there are so many steps involved (led backlight driver needs a 5v > 12v boost converter, there needs to some circuitry to handle different brightness levels, an enable signal etc) that it just wasn't worth it.

Then I took apart the dim LCD's backlight and yeah the CCFL in that was pretty tired, it read 3000 lumens on my Samsung S8's lux meter in the AIDA64 sensors section. And the acrylic light guide had some marks / residue which I think is from the acrylic getting damaged from heat or maybe sparks? Using a magic eraser / melamine sponge to sand back the edge of the light guide that the CCFL fits onto made a huge difference, then putting the 3500 lumen CCFL from the broken LCD made it even better. Putting it all back together the Libretto 70CT with the dim screen is now just as good as the other librettos. Definitely worth doing 😎

Oh also, I think I figured out the connector that the Libretto 50CT / 70CT use for the memory expansion connector, I think it's a bergstak 0.65mm "10169698-70000RLF". Very tempted to grab one from Mouser to see if it fits...